In manufacturing processes it is generally necessary to accept individual products continuously or in groups, as manufactured by a first workstation, and then deliver them either continuously or in groups to a second workstation. These methods disclosed in the prior art frequently require expensive devices or elaborate measures to ensure that the flow of products from the first processing station to the second processing station functions smoothly. This depends particularly on the spatial arrangement of the different processing stations and also on the chronological sequence in the production line. This is important, particularly when different processing measures, for example the shaping of products, the treatment of products, the packaging of products, and the like are carried out on different machines, which vary in terms of their processing capacities, quality rates, rejection rates, and maintenance intervals.
The general goal is to achieve the smoothest possible flow of products throughout the production line spanning from the processing of the products in the preliminary stages of production to packaging or cartoning of the products to make them ready for dispatch, such that the entire production flow is carried out in the most space-saving and economical manner possible. This is because an oversized and thus unused processing capacity at a processing station, for example, is usually reflected by unnecessarily high investment costs, since ultimately the total production capacity is only as great as that of the weakest link in the overall production chain.
The disadvantage of methods disclosed in the prior art for accepting one number of products and transferring a different number of products is that such methods usually require a great deal of space, particularly when it is intended to store or temporarily hold objects or products and also perform quality monitoring in the form of, say, in-process monitoring.